Writing books is a scary business, but the scariest bits of the entire game is this: it's very easy to make a complete mess of the entire project before you have written your first word.
How To Write A Book
A scary business
Writing books is a scary business, but the scariest bits of the entire game is this: it's very easy to make a complete mess of the entire project before you have written your first word. You can misjudge the market. You can foul up your plot. You can have a hopelessly insufficient knowledge of your characters, or the world in which they find themselves. If you get these things badly wrong from the outset, you're headed straight for a giant mess.
So planning matters. At the same time, any form of creative writing needs a kind of fluidity. It's just not possible to plan a thing out completely. For one thing, it's hard to squash all your inventiveness into the three month period you've allotted. For another, the process of writing will reveal more to you about your characters and your story, and you need to give yourself room to respond to these insights. How to write a book
The seat of your trousers
There is no one single way to approach these issues. I know one author who wrote so many notes when it came to researching her first novel that the notes ended up being longer than the book itself. I also know an excellent author (one of whose books was heavily promoted on TV and which sold a huge number of copies as a result) who takes precisely the opposite approach. she likes to research a period, get interested in some aspect of it, then she just starts to write. she barely knows her character and knows nothing of the story; she just throws the door open and waits to see what will come along. There are a number of other commercially successful authors who work in a similar way.
So there are different routes you can take, but most new writers who take one of these more extreme routes will have cause to regret it. If you are an extreme note-taker, then ask yourself honestly whether your book needs more research or whether you are simply procrastinating. It may well be that you are afraid of starting, which is a perfectly understandable fear and one to be cured in one way and one way only: by getting stuck in. As Kinglsey Amis famously put it, 'The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of one's trousers to the seat of one's chair'. There's a little more to it than that maybe, but it's still Lesson One, the only lesson that tolerates no exceptions.
Equally, if you're attracted to the vigour and boldness of the 'just get started' approach, ask yourself if you are not, in fact, afraid of the disciplines of planning, if you are not afraid of them because they're precisely what you most need. It's possible that, without planning anything out, you will write a wonderful novel, appear on TV and sell a zillion copies - but statistically speaking, you are vastly more likely to end up with an unsaleable manuscripts, most of whose flaws were entirely predictable from the outset. Get More Information
